If you’d extend your memory just a bit into the past, about a month or so ago, you’ll remember that we’re, for the second year in a row, sponsoring the excellent Post. Festival down in Indianapolis. This year’s set-list is as packed as last year, sporting some of the best post-rock bands from around the world, not just the US. What you might not know, however, is that this…
Each month, we always seem to come to the same conclusion when it comes to our Editors’ Picks column: Friday release days open the floodgates and unleash a seemingly endless stream of quality new music. But while some of our Editors and Contributors sit down gleefully each week to dive into this newly stocked treasure…
A few weeks ago, when we were premiering the latest single from Infinity Shred, I mentioned the wide range of emotions which the track evoked. Little did I know that this was just the tip of the iceberg. Whereas earlier releases had a definite dark edge to them, focusing mostly…
Throw a quick glance over Holy Roar’s active roster right now and you’ll find some truly heavy shit in there, scrapping with jagged nails and even sharper distortion. Riffs, spills, beatdowns, and blackened blasting – if it’s dark and packed full of angry decibels, they’ve got it. It’s not all…
Normally, lately, when I’m discussing the great music scene that Toronto has going on it’s to talk on and on about the tremendous well-spring of punk music that it has become. As with any scene hitting a creative spike, though, there are great things happening in that town across multiple genres. Now it’s time to highlight one of the up and coming acts in their post-hardcore scene, Sparrows, and their latest offering, Failed Gods. At times both exhilarating and exhausting, this album rides waves of highs and lows borne of chaotic riffs, meandering basslines, a bedrock of metronomic timekeeping, and…
While I hate to write a review for a band in context with other bands, it would be difficult not…
The idea of a “musical high” is a cliche by now and for good reason; music has an undeniably physical,…
There’s a very cool and underrated niche in which the psychedelic and the fantastic meld together. Instead of the Tolkien-esque aesthetic which has come to dominate much of our fantasy (an aesthetic I am a fan of but which can also get a bit too much), this kind of fantasy pictures undulating landscapes, chrome-colored vistas, and realms where hallucinations and the real start to meld. Bands have long focused this kind of approach into their music, led by the hallmark example of Hawkwind’s legendary work with Michael Moorcock, a pioneer of this style of fantasy. Together, the band and author…
Envenomed have been positioned as the next big thing in Australian thrash metal for a while now. The Melbourne band…
India might not be the first country that springs to mind when you think of thrash metal, and you’d be…
There has always been the sense of the eerie and the weird to Kayo Dot’s music. Perhaps that is in the nature of all the disparate styles we often clumsily bundle up together under the guise of avant-garde or art rock. This eeriness is, naturally, hard to define; it is a certain quality of haunting, of something slightly askew. To define by contrast, the grotesque is full on otherness, something so different that our minds reel in abject horror. But the weird is that which is different and yet just similar enough to the “normal” that it creates a twisted…
In the world of post-rock and post-metal, it’s a common joke that the musicians involved go to untold lengths to…
This is one of those albums that just makes you go “oh boy” and we really should have written about…
There’s been much written about both the quality of vinyl and the lack thereof. I’m not interested in wading into the fidelity wars, but I do want to cite a recent “
